Navigating 944 objects without a scrollbar
A dropdown with 112 options is a control you scroll, not one you use. Three ways in — and three silent bugs found on the way.
Michael StatonCorpora Builder
- colour = whenJan 2025 → Sept 2026
138 commits · +24,723 lines
Michael Staton845 reads become one
Search opened every file in the corpus. A manifest makes it one read — and Pagefind, built on that manifest, ranks what comes back.
Michael StatonA search that admits it is still thinking
The results panel looked like it was answering. It was showing the previous answer — confidently, for several seconds.
Michael StatonThe bucket has a corpus in it now
Fourteen days after R2 was decided, the prefix still held zero objects. 886 files went up in 28 seconds and came back byte-identical.
Michael StatonA client can finally see what we did
Two years of triage was invisible. `corpora changes` renders it in 0.23 seconds, and refuses to invent a reason where there isn't one.
Michael StatonThe corpus stops carrying its own binaries
140 MB of PDFs became 79.6 MB, addressed by content hash and fetched on demand — and the text-layer guard rejected one file, which is the point.
Michael StatonThe desktop app catches up with the corpus
Wired the new store into the app, opened it, and got a blank window. Drawing a header was reading 845 files.
Michael StatonThree modes, and the palette we actually use
The app looked like a stranger next to its siblings. Twice I fixed the wrong layer before looking at the screen.
Michael StatonOne way to name, fetch, and file a source
Three apps had independently converged on the same source-file model without noticing. The first blueprint fixes the canonical field set before a third vocabulary hardens.
Michael Statoncorpora-builder is born
Corpus building keeps reappearing inside every ai-labs product — so it gets a repo of its own, scaffolded with context-v, changelog, and a splash slot.
Michael Staton